(Video link here.) Who doesn’t find a part of their self-image or their mindset locked in a prison of some sort, or at the very least a girdle: hyper-tight, breath-stopping shape-wear that screams

DON’T SHOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

KEEP IT TIGHTLY UNDER WRAPS!

Brooklyn-based rapper Miss Eaves’ anthem features women of all shapes, ages and ethnicities groovin’ in their summer attire. It is a call to climb out of whatever shame-wear you’re bound by and celebrate. (If the loud, sassy music is too much, the joy and defiance comes through FINE with the sound off.)

Miss Eaves told Huffington Post that she created the song as an homage to herself.

I wrote this song as an ode to my own thick thighs…

…I wanted to take a word [thunder thighs] that is usually used to talk about bodies disparagingly and reclaim it.

Thunder Thighs! How strange and sad that bigness somehow became a negative. We think of the utterly voluptuous Venus of Willendorf, one of the earliest renderings of the female form carved some 25,000 years ago. According to neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, so they amplified the parts that mattered most: the breasts and pelvic girdle that had to do with successful reproduction.

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul,

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—for they are poems,

But we guess Whitman never imagined the forms of liberation and identity exploration some modern men have been testing out, like Bob Carey photographing himself in a pink tutu, in response to his wife’s having breast cancer, which grew into the Tutu Project.

Bob Carey

A man often-derided-for-his-ample-girth sent us Miss Eaves’ video, which he loved for its liberating celebration of bigness.

In the last page of Poem of the Body, Whitman grabs the real wonder that curiously resonates with Miss Eaves song, written 150 years later:

subscribing = loving

If the Improvised Life is a source of creativity, inspiration, ideas and change in your daily life, please consider becoming a Friend with Benefits. A little bit goes a long way towards helping us publish fresh AD-FREE content each day.